Dike Okoro - Böcker

This book investigates how African authors and artists have explored themes of the future and technology within their works. Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s as a means of exploring the intersection of African diaspora culture with technology, science and science fiction. However, this book argues that literature and other arts within Africa have always reflected on themes of futurism, across diverse forms of speculative writing (including science fiction), images, spirituality, myth, magical realism, the supernatural, performance and other forms of oral resources. This book reflects on themes of African futurism across a range of literary and artistic works, also investigating how problems such as racism, sexism, social injustice and postcolonialism are reflected in these narratives. Chapters cover authors, artists, movements and performers such Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Elechi Amadi, Mazisi Kunene, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Leslie Nneka Arimah and the New African Movement. The book also includes a range of original interviews with prominent authors and artists, including Tanure Ojaide, Lauren Beukes, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Benjamin Kwakye, Ntongela Masilela and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of African literature, philosophy, culture and politics.

This book investigates how African authors and artists have explored themes of the future and technology within their works. Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s as a means of exploring the intersection of African diaspora culture with technology, science and science fiction. However, this book argues that literature and other arts within Africa have always reflected on themes of futurism, across diverse forms of speculative writing (including science fiction), images, spirituality, myth, magical realism, the supernatural, performance and other forms of oral resources. This book reflects on themes of African futurism across a range of literary and artistic works, also investigating how problems such as racism, sexism, social injustice and postcolonialism are reflected in these narratives. Chapters cover authors, artists, movements and performers such Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Elechi Amadi, Mazisi Kunene, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Leslie Nneka Arimah and the New African Movement. The book also includes a range of original interviews with prominent authors and artists, including Tanure Ojaide, Lauren Beukes, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Benjamin Kwakye, Ntongela Masilela and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of African literature, philosophy, culture and politics.

This book examines the life and work of Mazisi Kunene, the only recognized poet laureate of Africa, a Nobel Prize nominee, and a key symbol of African cultural independence.Kunene is widely recognized for his epic poems that assert cultural identity and condemn the disruption of the growth and development of African culture through colonialism/postcolonialism. This book explores how ‘oraliterature’ and cultural traditions informed Kunene’s poetry, how Kunene’s poetry highlights African women and mothers, and how activism, mythology and transnational identities are depicted in his verse to promote cultural and generational continuities from Africa to the Diasporic Africans. Drawing on a range of interviews and comparative studies, the book situates Kunene’s work in a wider conversation about South African social struggles.This book is an important contribution to our understanding of one of the giants of African literary history. As such, it will be of interest to researchers across African literary and postcolonial studies.

This book examines the life and work of Mazisi Kunene, the only recognized poet laureate of Africa, a Nobel Prize nominee, and a key symbol of African cultural independence.Kunene is widely recognized for his epic poems that assert cultural identity and condemn the disruption of the growth and development of African culture through colonialism/postcolonialism. This book explores how ‘oraliterature’ and cultural traditions informed Kunene’s poetry, how Kunene’s poetry highlights African women and mothers, and how activism, mythology and transnational identities are depicted in his verse to promote cultural and generational continuities from Africa to the Diasporic Africans. Drawing on a range of interviews and comparative studies, the book situates Kunene’s work in a wider conversation about South African social struggles.This book is an important contribution to our understanding of one of the giants of African literary history. As such, it will be of interest to researchers across African literary and postcolonial studies.

An interrogation of the poetry of Mazisi Kunene that places his work in the context of African literature and the richness of the oral tradition, as well as his political activism that connects him to the wider African diaspora. As Africa’s foremost epic poet, Mazisi Kunene occupies a unique place in history. In this study, Dike Okoro illuminates the penetrating insights found in Kunene's poetry and the reasons why his art has been considered as masterpieces grounded in geography, history, and culture. He situates Kunene as a theorist who embraces African tradition – including his adoption of izibongo, Zulu praise poetry – and the role of the artist as a chronicler of his people’s history, committed to art as a catalyst for change, not justd South Africa but for Africans around the globe. These essays and interviews address the post-apartheid reality of South Africa and draw from a repository of rich images found in Kunene's poetry to provide examples of depictions of colonial exploitation in Africa; the rootedness of traditional African culture; women and children who bring hope; and art as a way to effect change. They demonstrate Kunene’s profound influence on and in world literature, interrogating his work for its style and connections with poetry by Native Americans and other Indigenous literary traditions. The Epic Poetry of Mazisi Kunene argues that Mazisi Kunene's poetry centers non-human beings (animals and plants), the pristine environment of the olden days, and the cosmology of his Zulu ethnicity, asserting the relevance of his art – in this 21st-century moment of climate crisis – as both a form of activism and a political tool to the African creative writer.

Dike Okoro analyzes the various manifestations of ecocriticism and political activism in the poetry of Lupenga Mphande, who is arguably Africa’s first poet to explore the existence of territorial cults and natural shrines. This book is recommended for students and scholars seeking new interpretations of the African experience in contemporary world literature.

This book traces the evolution and characteristics of Malawian poetry of resistance, which emerged during the late 1960s and the early 1990s and is distinguished by its expressive modes and concerns. Creative writings during this period reflected new sensibilities and anxieties in the era of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s dictatorial rule, which resulted in the censorship of writings critical of the government, and the imprisonment of the authors. This study examines the second generation of Malawian poets and nonfiction writers from the 1970s to the present, along with the younger generation of Malawian speculative fiction writers, novelists, artists, and sculptors published between 2000 and 2021, to connect their voices to other generations and wider issues in African literature and art. It covers a number of themes, including exile (life in the west/diaspora), tyranny, prison literature, activism, protest tradition and resistance, orality, intertextuality, Afropolitanism and cosmopolitanism, exile, folklore, childhood, wars, Black Lives Matter, ecocriticism, and disability.